Hosting and Supporting GIT conversion of Fedora CVS to enable downstream development efforts and distributions

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Nov 28, 2007 9:15 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Frankly, I don't think the Board has any business in this discussion
> yet.  There are known pain points in providing this (and switching SCMs
> all together), the benefits to Fedora are little to none at the moment,
> and it can be hosted elsewhere.

I don't see much here that needs rubber stamping from the board.
Let me sum up where i think the discussion is at:

1) A community member has done the necessary work to implement a way to make
a copy of fedora's cvs and turn it into something git friendly.  This
gives downstream people who are comfortable with git a way a new
interact with our package sources. This is not a bad thing, and I
decree that as a board member such initiative should be applauded.
I'd send him a t-shirt and some stickers, but I don't have any.

2) This person feels comfortable enough with how its working to want
to expose this as a public consumable for other people. The question
is how to best do that.

3) There are some concerns about doing this as part of infrastructure
right now.  There is some resource duplication here and since git has
not been selected as the next piece of technology to use its not clear
that providing git as a fedora services versus some other technology
is worth the resource burn.  If there was a long term directive to
move to git for Fedora's usage, then there would be a compelling
reason to burn internal infrastructure resources to duplicate cvs into
git.

4) Infrastructure is willing to help make it easier for a community
hosted solution to get access to cvs for duplication.

Do I have the story so far?  If there isn't a cohesive plan to start
transitioning to git internally over sometime scale, I'm not sure
exactly what I'm suppose to be supporting.  I've got other things I'd
like to see infrastructure diskspace and human resources used for like
spin source isos, that I feel are far more critical to provide than a
duplication of cvs content as a git consumable.  I mean I'm not going
to actively lobby against duplicating git but I've no reason to prefer
to see resources used for this over other things.

Here's the reality as I see it. We simply can not do everything as
part of internal infrastructure.  Sometimes this project will need to
rely on community provided services to extend the projects
capabilities into new areas.  Some of these things will eventually be
pulled into the project as an internal service based on the success
and growth of the service while it was being hosted externally. Other
services won't be  for a variety of reasons (though none of the
efforts should be considered failures even if they are discarded or
reach a niche audience)

What the Board needs to figure out is how to make it possible to make
the Fedora brand a big enough tent to encompass services that are not
internally hosted, in an equitable manner.  Encourage people to host
community services, give credit where credit is due, and give these
external community services some credibility as being an outgrowth of
the project and some recognition as to the effort being made
regardless as whether the service is adopted/co-opted by the Fedora
project offically .

-jef